Power of Cluster Genealogy, Part 2

After a couple of phone calls, I connected with a relative who was John Hugh Breeding’s great-granddaughter (a third cousin once removed of mine).   After we visited by phone on a Sunday evening, we made plans for our families to get together at their house near Austin, Texas for the next weekend.   This would be my first genealogy meeting (in person).   When we met our relative, she had a tremendous amount of information on Huston’s oldest brother and also had some other information on his brothers and sisters as well.    We spent probably 6 or 7 hours just listening to stories and trading information.   Truly, the time just slipped away for me.   I took my scanner and it got some good use and I was able to share with her some of the photos of Byram Breeding and the newspaper articles detailing when Huston was shot.   In return, she shared photographs of Huston’s oldest brother and a letter that Huston’s father Byram had written to his second wife Ann after he had left the family.  

Just as important, she was able to introduce me to another relative who had devoted some considerable time to researching the Breeding family history.   Of course, the one thing they were both interested in was what happened to Byram Breeding (Huston’s father) and the family once they moved from Tennessee to Arkansas.   For all of us, it was quite fortunate that I had already assembled much of that information during 2008. 

Of course, our good fortune didn’t end there.   The very next weekend we traveled up to Fort Worth, Texas to meet another relative and he took us through the information he had gathered.   Unlike the previous meeting where I was so focused on the family stories and all the data, this time I took some time to ask process-related “how to” questions on how to find research, how to go into the court houses and where to look for some other genealogical artifacts.   Like the earlier meeting, he also suggested that I look into contacting some Tennessee relatives that they had previously met to see if they might be able to share some information on the Breedings with me as well.

At its most fundamental aspect, this project has been much more than just assembling information.  It’s really about sharing.  From a genealogical standpoint, it’s very difficult to know everything, but when we're able to share and help others go through the barriers that we’ve gone through, that’s what really makes the difference.    When I look back, those first few visits (and many others that followed) were so critical to finding the great stories and all the photographs we have uncovered.  If I had simply stayed with my direct line, I would have found some good research, but it was only when I extended it out to my second, third and fourth cousins that I found a tremendous amount of material that relatives in my directly line had never seen before.  Somewhere along the line, brothers and sisters had traded photographs, letters and other artifacts and those items remained in their families over the years.  The only obstacle was just finding these arms of the family, reaching out to them and bringing them into the family discussion. 

Power of Cluster Genealogy, Part 1

Many times I have referred to myself as a genealogist that just stumbled into things.  I never really had much formal training in doing this type of sleuthing work.  Even if you work in the research field, this type of research encompasses an entirely different skill set.  With that said, many of my major discoveries have tended to be done in a haphazard, accidental way. 

When I first got started, I really only wanted to find out about my direct line of ancestors, my Grandpa Lyle Breeding, my Great-Grandpa Hugh Breeding and my Great-Great-Grandpa Huston Breeding.    Even once we got the idea of writing biographies, I only thought about accumulating information on just only Hugh Breeding’s brothers and sisters.  What I didn’t know was that even when you focus on just one line of ancestors, you would most likely benefit from also studying the spouse, children, and siblings at the same time.  It was this concept of “Cluster Genealogy” that really advanced this family project way beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined.   Formally defined, “Cluster Genealogy” takes into account not only the parents and children in a nuclear family but also the collateral lines of brothers, sisters, and cousins in each generation, and the families of spouses.   Simply put: the more you learn about this extended family cluster, the more you are likely to learn and understand about the ancestral lineage you are researching.

On still another Friday night, (April 17, 2009 to be exact), I got the idea to not just look only at my Great-Grandpa Hugh Breeding’s siblings (the initial focus of my research in that first year) but also move up one set of limbs (or branches, if you will) in the tree and more closely examine the siblings of my Great-Great Grandpa Huston Breeding.    As a natural starting point, I selected his oldest brother, John Hugh Breeding.  I performed a couple of internet searches and pretty soon, I found that he was one of the founding members of a town named Cottonwood, Texas and I also uncovered quite a lot of information on his children.   The next week I called the Cottonwood, Texas Historical Society (yes, there is such a society) and they were able to connect me with a couple of John Hugh Breeding’s descendants.  

Sharing the story - Creation of the family website

After starting to meet so many relatives so quickly during that first year, I ultimately needed a vehicle to communicate all the news, stories and photographs that everyone was contributing.   One idea was to create a website so that our “circle of relatives” could go online with their computers (at a time that was convenient for them) and view the new research, make contributions, invite other family members, etc.   My hesitation was that a lot of this coolected information I wanted to keep private amongst ourselves.   In this case, a public website was just not going to suffice.   However, we had a family relative who recommended the MyFamily website as a solution.   I had been a member of another MyFamily site based on another arm of my family and was fairly impressed with all the features including the security.  So with that in mind, I thought I would give it a try and we created the website that would ultimately be called “The Breedings of Overton County, Tennessee.”

In that first month, one of my cousins and I had posted several photographs and I was signing relatives up with their email addresses and I was also posting quite a few news items.    However, a short time after getting the website up and running, I still wasn’t too sold that this was what I wanted to do.  As I have often said, family research requires a lot of patience and several times I thought about dropping the project or at least placing it on the shelf for a while.   For me, I mostly feel like this after I feel I have taken the project as far as I can take it and I don’t uncover anything new.   Of course, every time this occurs, big things are right around the corner.   And after initially creating the family website, I had a one month trial to make a decision whether to proceed with an annual subscription or cancel the membership. 

With about three days left on my one month trial (March 3, 2009 to be exact), my wife excitedly called me on the phone after going to the mailbox.  In the delivery was not just one package, but two!   Two cousins had sent some rather large parcels chock full of photos, memories and recipes.  With these donations, we now had photos of all the Huston Breeding children - even Mary Lou (which I thought we never would see what she looked like)!   

This was our first picture of Mary Lou Breeding
(standing second from the left).   Early on,
as she was so central to our research, we wanted nothing
more than to know what she looked like

 
We had photos of the children when they were younger and when they were older.  Altogether, we would post over 170 family photographs to the new family website!  I know it doesn’t sound like much now with us now having over 2000 photographs, but at the time, it was significant.   With these new contributions, there was no way that I going to let my cousins down – so ultimately, we signed up for a long-term membership for the website. 

One of the beauties of having these new photographs was that relatives were now logging on more frequently and even calling me up to see if I could print copies from the high resolution digital photos for them.  It’s a service that I have gladly performed for all of our relatives – and still do to this day.  In addition, our relatives were starting to tell their other family members about the site and the subscriptions to our website (and our family circle) began growing on a daily basis.

Today, the website is still up and running and definitely serves the purpose as a tool for sharing all the findings we uncover on a daily basis.  What an investment in sharing!